Lars Bang Larsen

Western Front Media Arts is pleased to present a lecture by Copenhagen based art historian Lars Bang Larsen, in conjunction with the 13th Annual New Forms Festival.

Reflections from Damaged Life: a talk on art and psychedelia

The talk will revolve around the connection between art and psychedelic imagery, concepts and practices, and propose that this relationship harbours an unexplored aesthetic potential that art history has failed to address. Instead of the visual culture of the youth revolt of the late 1960’s or the retrieval of a lost ‘ism’, this inquiry follows a path that is non-linear and non-canonical through singular artistic interpretations of how the psychedelic notion of transformation might lead to new possibilities for experience. A critical reading of art’s relationship to psychedelia must therefore consider how psychedelia has travelled outside of familiar forms and orbits and re-appeared in visual art, such as Latin America’s first psychedelic zine, Marta Minujín’s Lo Inadvertido; the queer acid drag of The Cockettes in San Francisco; and the Perestroika-era, folk psychedelia of the Moscow group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics. These are examples of counter-narratives to the hippies’ metaphysics of love, and other myths of a white West’s recovered innocence. These are instances of how the concept recovered itself beyond a direct relationship to desire, to the ‘tribe’, or to the music scene. The talk itself will potentially be a challenge to the brain and nervous system as it sets out to dramatize psychedelia’s rich web of associations in a marathon format of three hours.